The wheels of Russian bureaucracy turn slowly. In this case, however, the reasons for delay weren’t official inertia. Putin was carefully weighing up the likely fall-out from granting Snowden asylum. On 24 July, Kucherena said Snowden’s status was still unresolved. In the meantime, Snowden would stay at the Moscow airport.
The lawyer indicated that Snowden was now thinking long-term about a life and possibly a job in Russia: that he intended to stay in the country and to ‘study Russian culture’. He had apparently picked up a few words of Russian: ‘Hi’ and ‘How are you doing?’ Snowden had even tried khatchapuri, Georgian cheese bread.
On 1 August 2013 – 39 days after he flew into Moscow – Snowden strolled out of the airport. Russia had granted him one year’s temporary asylum. The state channel Rossiya 24 showed a photo of Snowden’s departure. He was grinning, carrying a rucksack and a large holdall, and accompanied by a delighted Harrison. Out of the transit zone at last, he exchanged a few words with Kucherena on the pavement. Snowden climbed into a grey unmarked car. The car drove off. Snowden disappeared.
Kucherena showed reporters a copy of Snowden’s new temporary document, which allowed him to cross into Russia. His name, ‘SNOWDEN, EDWARD JOSEPH’, was printed in Cyrillic capitals. There was a fingerprint and fresh passport photo. Security officials said Snowden had left the transit zone at about 3.30pm local time. Russia had apparently not informed the US beforehand.
Kucherena said he wasn’t giving any details about where Snowden was going since he was the ‘most wanted man on the planet’. A statement from WikiLeaks said that he and Harrison were headed to a ‘secure confidential place’. It quoted Snowden as saying: ‘Over the past eight weeks we have seen the Obama administration show no respect for international or domestic law, but in the end the law is winning. I thank the Russian Federation for granting me asylum in accordance with its laws and international obligations.’
US reaction was bitter. The White House announced that Obama was cancelling his bilateral meeting with Putin scheduled to take place during September’s G20 summit, which Russia was hosting in St Petersburg. The president’s spokesperson Jay Carney said the White House was ‘extremely disappointed’. Carney effectively accused Snowden of gifting US secrets to a rival power: ‘Simply the possession of that kind of highly sensitive classified information outside of secure areas is both a huge risk and a violation. As we know he’s been in Russia now for many weeks. There is a huge risk associated with… removing that information from secure areas. You shouldn’t do it, you can’t do it, it’s wrong.’
It was left to the Republican senator John McCain to twist the knife further. McCain, whom Snowden, writing as TheTrueHOOHA, had admired, was a long-standing critic of the White House’s efforts to ‘reset’ relations with Moscow – an accommodationist policy which in McCain’s view merely encouraged Putin’s more obnoxious behaviour. McCain tweeted: ‘Snowden stays in the land of transparency and human rights. Time to hit that reset button again #Russia.’
Where did Snowden go? Red Square and the Kremlin are an ensemble of high ochre walls and golden orthodox towers. At the end of Red Square are the surrealistic onion domes of St Basil’s cathedral.
If you walk up the hill from here past the Metropole Hotel and a statue of Karl Marx you reach a large, forbidding, classically cut building. This is the Lubyanka. Once the headquarters of the KGB, it is now the home of the FSB. Inside, the answer to that question is certainly known. Meanwhile, Russian journalists would speculate Snowden was staying at a presidential sanatorium somewhere near Moscow.
The hacker turned whistleblower had got his asylum. But the longer he stayed out of public view the more it appeared that he was, in some informal way, the FSB’s prisoner.
12
DER SHITSTORM!
OBERSTLEUTNANT GRUBITZ: ‘Dreyman’s good, eh?’
WIESLER: ‘I’d have him monitored.’
In the lobby is a statue of a man with a goatee beard. He is ‘Iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of Lenin’s secret police. On the wall is a map. It depicts what used to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR), before its dramatic collapse in 1989. The map is divided into districts. Major cities are marked in bold: (East) Berlin – the capital in communist times – Dresden, Magdeburg, Leipzig.
This forbidding building in Berlin-Lichtenberg was once the headquarters of the GDR’s Ministry for State Security, an organisation better known by its abbreviation – the Stasi. The Stasi was modelled on Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka. It was in part a criminal investigation department. But it was also a secret intelligence agency and a political secret police. For nearly four decades – from 1950 until the collapse of the Berlin Wall – the Stasi conducted a sweeping campaign against the GDR’s ‘enemies’. These were, for the most part, internal. The Stasi’s declared goal was ‘to know everything’.
On the first floor are the offices of the man who directed this campaign, Erich Mielke, the Stasi boss from 1957 to 1989. Seen through modern eyes, his bureau seems modest. There is a comfy chair, 1960s furniture, an old-fashioned dial telephone and an electric typewriter. Next door is a day bed in case Mielke needed a snooze. Built into one of the cabinets is a concealed tape machine. There is a large conference room on the same floor. Whenever Mielke met with his fellow Stasi generals he recorded their conversations.
By the standards of the Soviet bloc, East Germany was a success. In a relatively brief period it managed to establish the most thorough surveillance state in history. The number of Stasi agents grew from 27,000 in 1950 to 91,000 in 1989. Another 180,000 worked as Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs), or unofficial informers. The true figure was probably higher. They spied on friends, workmates, neighbours and family members. Husbands spied on wives. By the time of the GDR’s demise, two in every 13 citizens were informers.
The Stasi’s favoured method of keeping a lid on dissent was eavesdropping. There was bugging, wiretapping, observation. The Stasi monitored 2,800 postal addresses; the agency steamed 90,000 letters a day. This was laborious stuff. Most of the voluminous information gathered was banal, of little intelligence value. The Stasi’s version of the Puzzle Palace came crashing down on 15 January 1990, when angry protesters stormed Mielke’s compound in Normannenstrasse and ransacked his files.
Given Germany’s totalitarian backstory – the Nazis then communists – it was hardly surprising that Snowden’s revelations caused outrage. In fact, a newish noun was used to capture German indignation at US spying: der Shitstorm. The Anglicism entered the German dictionary Duden in July 2013, as the NSA affair blew around the world. Der Shitstorm refers to widespread and vociferous outrage expressed on the internet, especially on social media platforms.
The ghosts of the Gestapo helped define the West German state, which existed next door to the Stasi. The cultural memory of state snooping still haunts its unified successor. Many of the most successful recent German films and books, such as The Lives of Others – a telling fantasy set in the GDR of 1984 – or Hans Fallada’s Nazi-era Alone in Berlin, dramatise the traumatic experience of being spied on.